Qualcomm said that co-operation with Microsoft started with Snapdragon support for Windows 10. The next step is that both parties are announcing their collaboration to accelerate adoption of Cloud Services with Qualcomm Centriq 2400 – the industry’s first 10nm server processor. Microsoft is enabling Windows Server for Redmond's own internal use and in its data centers. This is a huge win for Qualcomm as many enterprises rely on Microsoft’s data centers and services. Just think of the enterprise dependencies on Exchange email servers and the Office 365 distributed platform.
Microsoft is serious about getting into the ARM-based server market and it has entered in multi-year efforts with companies such as Qualcomm.
Qualcomm also announced that it has delivered the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard server specification to the OCP (Open Compute Project). The project was started in 2009 by Facebook and it is a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support growing demands on compute infrastructure. Qualcomm has joined the project as a "gold" member and it hopes that the companies will start commercially using its Centriq products soon.
The company announced that it is aligning specification with Microsoft’s direction for the data center via compliance with Project Olympus. Project Olympus is essentially a hardware platform necessary to support Microsoft Azure cloud computing.
In December Qualcomm’ Datacenter Technologies senior vice president and general manager ,Anand Chandrasekher demonstrated the Centriq 2400. He said that this was the world’s first 10 nm 48 core data center processor and the fact that Microsoft and OCP shared his enthusiasm about the platform was important for Qualcomm's data center effort.
Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard has a single Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor with up to 48 cores and six DDR4 (2667MT/s) per SoC with one or two DIMMs per Channel. When it comes to connectivity, Qualcomm Centriq 2400 OCP motherboard supports 50 Gb/s NIC, 32 lanes of PCIe Gen 3, two USB Connectors, 1GbE Ethernet PHY and eight SATA ports. It fits the Half-Width 1U Standard Form Factor
The Microsoft Project Olympus Chassis includes a Single Node 1U design with up to 48 cores for highly parallelised, compute applications. It should do a good job with compute-memory intensive Big Data or Hadoop style cloud applications. The server is modular and fits in a 19-inch standard rack.
Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Open Compute Motherboard runs GCC and LLVM compilers and middleware. It supports Red Hat, Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview, CentOS 7 OS and Canonical Ubuntu 16.04.3.
There will be a few variations of the Open Compute motherboard. The Open Compute motherboard + storage comes with the Dual CPU Node, sixteen 2.5” SATA HDD, two PCIe NVMe and one Multi-Host NIC.
Open Compute Motherboard + NVMe Fabric has a single processor, one PCIe x16 and twenty NVMe drives. The Open Compute Motherboard + Acceleration has a single Centriq 2400 processor one PCIe X16 and GPU or FPGA.
